[Danox]

The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service.

I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.

[laurencerowe]

The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)

The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.

[crote]

> Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.

Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.

[rcbdev]

Please read Directive (EU) 2022/2557 and then tell me how a disgruntled office worker is supposed to do anything they aren't supposed to, given full compliance with the directive. I've seen some preliminary national implementation efforts and it's really serious stuff physical security wise.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

[eqvinox]

> full compliance with the directive

I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.

Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…

[gambiting]

But again:

>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.

Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.

[RetroTechie]

There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that.

Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.

Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.

[gambiting]

>> impossible to get to by a normal employee

No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?

>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that

Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.

[fakedang]

Hahaha, uninformed comment right here.

Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.

[leonidasrup]

Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:

1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.

2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.

3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.

4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_repro...

[Moldoteck]

no, weapons production is unrealated anyway - it's cheaper to do it in special facilities. Thorium was just too late to the party when most units were classic PWR's and BWR's without complicated handling

[adrianN]

You don’t have to make a nuclear bomb for highly effective terrorism. Just blow up the reactor

[LtdJorge]

You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium

[leonidasrup]

"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle

Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:

"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.

The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material

[nrb]

I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.

[chickenbig]

> You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...

[pbgcp2026]

And I already can imagine that prompt "Mythos, create a design for ..."

[fc417fc802]

Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.

[budsniffer952]

You think this is a modern American problem?

What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun?

This is a forever problem.

[Recurecur]

Indeed. Good to hear you’re a Trump supporter!